As momentum has grown to ban TikTok over national security concerns, critics have mounted a resistance effort. Despite TikTok’s strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), these critics allege that a ban would violate the First Amendment, even comparing it to banning a newspaper or TV channel. Such analogies are profoundly lacking in geopolitical awareness.
Back in 2020, former CIA officer Klon Kitchen framed this issue perfectly on 60 Minutes: Imagine you woke up one morning and discovered that China had distributed 100 million sensors across the United States. As it turns out, such a surveillance network already exists; it’s called TikTok.
Moreover, TikTok has been caught numerous times in the act of surveillance. It has been caught using its network to spy on journalists, and one security researcher discovered that TikTok has been monitoring your keystrokes and taps. It’s no wonder that FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China can use TikTok for espionage operations.
Simply put, you can’t get away with that sort of behavior by putting a social network on top of your surveillance network, and then claiming that it’s protected free speech.
Even Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch — who typically defends the First Amendment rights of corporations — has thrown cold water on that argument. As he framed it, if you banned a certain brand of phones because China planted surveillance chips in them, nobody would accuse of you trying to ban phones.
Jonah’s analogy is also apt because the FCC has done something similar in the past: In November 2022, the FCC unanimously banned the U.S. sales of Chinese telecommunications equipment made by Huawei and ZTE that posed national security concerns.
The courts have also upheld the FCC’s ban. As Joel Thayer pointed out, a ban on TikTok would legally be most similar to that case; the legal arguments that a ban is unconstitutional are quite weak.
TikTok also poses a unique national security concern with respect to AI. Training an AI system requires lots and lots of data; China can use the massive data provided by TikTok to train its own AI. China’s AI strategy explicitly says that they will “promote two-way conversion and application for military and civilian scientific and technological achievements and co-construction and sharing of military and civilian innovation resources.” If it benefits a civilian app like TikTok, it will also benefit China’s military.
Where this is especially concerning is facial recognition. Training an AI for facial recognition would require lots of videos that contain faces in them. And TikTok fits that bill perfectly.
What’s more, China is currently carrying out genocide of the Uyghurs. Any advances in facial recognition could certainly be deployed in the surveillance state that China has created to monitor Uyghur concentration camps.
Those dancing videos may seem harmless to you, but they could be deadly for Uyghurs.
Some, however, argue that what we really need is a national privacy law for the U.S. Let’s pretend the U.S. had such a law. The U.S. government previously banned TikTok on government devices, but with a national privacy law in place, should government officials feel comfortable reinstalling TikTok on their devices? Even though this hypothetical law would make it illegal to share data with China, reinstalling TikTok would still be an unacceptable security risk.
That hypothetical question cuts straight to the heart of the issue: Even if we create new rules, we cannot assume that a CCP-backed company would follow those rules. After all, the U.S. already has rules for intellectual property, but those rules have not prevented IP theft from China and CCP-backed companies. Why would we expect a different result with new privacy rules?
As Alec Stapp noted, during the Cold War, it would have been unthinkable to let the Soviet Union own CBS, NBC, or ABC. Even though the Cold War is over, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has served a stark reminder that these sorts of geopolitical concerns have not gone away. When it comes to allowing a Chinese-backed company like TikTok in the U.S., we cannot treat it as if it’s just another TV channel.
Mike Wacker is a software engineer and technologist who has previously served as tech fellow in Congress.